red light might land up getting shot by the driver.
I sat, watched and waited. It wouldn't look abnormal to the staff or anyone else for me to be spending this amount of time in here. They could have been forgiven for thinking I was a dosser paying for temporary shelter with a large coffee. Not that anybody would have cared. The thing about cities is that the slickers and the dossers have no choice but to rub shoulders. It wasn't as if I was the only strange-looking person in town.
I checked around me again, just to be sure that I wasn't sitting next to a trigger. Stranger things have happened.
I watched for another five minutes past the RV time, finished off the coffee and Danish, and walked outside. As I pulled the door of Caffe Nero towards me I saw the back of Lynn's Russian hat in the queue. The flaps were still tied under his chin. He looked even weirder than I did. I walked past him and did my surprised, 'Hi! What are you doing here?'
He turned, smiled that happy, I-haven't-seen-you-for-awhile look, and we shook hands. 'Great to see you, it's been . . . ages.' He beamed.
'Coffee?' I took a look around. All the seats were taken. 'Tell you what, you got time for a Micky D?'
We left the coffee shop and I headed left. He fell into step beside me and shot me a quizzical look. 'What the devil is a Micky D?'
'McDonald's.'
'Is that where we're really going?'
'No. Not yet anyway. Keep your head down.'
I walked backwards to watch the oncoming traffic and flagged down a cab.
'Golden Lane Estate, mate.'
It was only a ten-minute walk, but that was ten minutes more exposure to Big Brother.
'Who are we meeting, Nick?'
'No one. I've got something there for when I'm in the shit. I think this is the moment, don't you?'
44
The Golden Lane Estate was originally built for essential workers – firemen, nurses, that kind of stuff. But in the eighties' housing boom it all went private and now belonged to architects and traders. They're nice little two- bedroom flats rubbing shoulders with the City.
The only subject I had really liked at school was history, and I'd lapped up the sales leaflet I found when I went to check it out. In the eighteenth century it was a warren of slums and red-light areas. By the end of the nineteenth the slums had been replaced by warehouses and train yards. The Great Cripplegate fire of 1897 began in an ostrich-feather warehouse and swept away most of the remaining residential buildings.
By the start of the twentieth century only 6,000 people lived here. Then, on a single night in December 1940, the Luftwaffe destroyed virtually every building in the area. The bombsite lay abandoned until an architectural competition in 1951, and the Golden Lane Estate was born in all its glory: one eleven-storey block, twelve terrace blocks, and a leisure centre with a twenty-metre swimming pool and two all-weather tennis courts.
We couldn't go straight to the cache. I was going to have to clear the area, in case it had been discovered and it was linked to me as a known location. If that was the case, they would have a trigger on it to see if I turned up.
We were more or less level with the entrance to the estate. If I'd been triggered as I left the station or the coffee shop, they would now be behind me, thinking that I was heading for my security blanket. Unless the area was covered by enough CCTV cameras to cover me electronically.
Two attractive women approached from the opposite direction, sandwich-bar paper bags in their hands. I would have no more than three seconds in which to check. They passed, laughing and talking loudly. Now was the time. I turned to give them an admiring glance, in the way men think they do unobtrusively. The two women gave me a 'You should be so lucky' look and got back to their laughing.
There were three candidates beyond them. A middle-aged couple dressed for the office turned the corner behind me. They looked too preoccupied, staring into each other's eyes for as long as possible before getting back to the grindstone. Then again, good operators would always make it look that way. The other possible was coming from straight ahead, and on the estate side of the street. He looked like a builder; he was wearing blue jeans and a thick, dark blue shirt with the tail hanging out, the way I would if I wanted to cover my weapon and radio.
I turned back in the direction I'd been heading. If they were operators, the couple behind me would now look as though they were exchanging sweet nothings, but actually be reporting what I was getting up to, on a radio net, telling the Desk and the other operators where I was, what I was wearing, and the same for my friend. And if they were good, they would also say that I could be aware, because of the look back.
I carried on to the end of the estate and turned left. The couple were still with me. I stopped outside the last of the shops to read the cards in the window selling everything from second-hand vacuum cleaners to personal massage, before turning left again. Three corners in a circular route isn't natural. A good operator wouldn't turn the third corner, but if the lovers came past, I would bin the RV anyway. Better safe than sorry.
A target going static short-term is always awkward for a surveillance team. Everybody's got to get in position, so that next time the target goes mobile they've covered every possible option. That way, the target moves to the team, instead of the team crowding the target. But was there a trigger here? I'd find out soon enough.
Nothing happened during the five minutes it took me to read every card. Lynn stood nervously beside me.
'Don't worry. They're not going to hit us here in the middle of the city. If they know we're here, they'll wait.'
